with few exceptions, a perverse fate fills all the
round holes with square pegs, and vice versa.
I am a square peg, and I fill a round hole; fill
it well, certainly, and don't wobble about as
some square pegs would do in the situation;
but why am I not in the rectangular orifice
designed for me? I know why. Happening
to slip in here to see how I should fit, I was
stamped into the place before I could get out
again. All my enemies, the moment they caught
me in the hole, came in a troop and hammered
away at me, one after the other, until now my
fine edges are worn off, and I am hopelessly
jammed in. I see about me a great many pegs,
round and square, all filling the wrong holes in a
most inadequate manner. The majority of them,
however, have reason to rejoice that they find
themselves in any hole whatever. There is the
peg Spindler. It is popularly supposed that he
fits his hole neatly. I tell you he has been
plugged in there. Take him up, pull him out —
like a paving-stone or a brick — and throw him
among a heap of his fellows. He may pass
muster in a job-lot; but when the paviour or
the mason comes to single him out, he will not
be thought worth the re-dressing.

Then there are my friends, the two idiots.
Why are they selected for the heavy business?
Because the solemnity of their dulness was
mistaken in early life for profundity. Because
they were never seen to smile; because they
were never known to make a joke; because they
are ugly; because they have big heads; because
they are old; because Time has rusted them in
their holes. Pouncer, again. How is it that he
fills so important a place? Because, without
any special fitness for any hole whatever, he has
always been a candidate for every hole vacant.
Fortune is fickle; but a pertinacious man may
bother her out of her life. Pouncer has bothered
her out of her life. The greatest authority on
Russian affairs of the present time is a man who
once paid a visit of ten days to his aunt at Riga.
He learned all about the serf question during
those ten days at Riga. If a history of Russia
were wanted, Jobbins would be sent for to do it.
Why has Hornby acquired a reputation for the
possession of profound scientific knowledge?
Because, early in life, he wore the hair off the
top of his head, mounted spectacles, dressed at
all times in a swallow-tailed black coat, and constantly
let people catch him perusing a scientific
treatise. It was a good dodge of Hornby to
turn his bald head and weak eyes to scientific
account. It pays.

Viewing on all hands this ill-assorted array of
pegs, I have come to a very grand and comprehensive
conclusion. It is this: that the few
cases throughout history in which the right man
has been in the right place, have been the results
of accident. Accident, which has put so many
men in the wrong place, has put a few— a very
few— in the right. Shakespeare found the right
hole; so did Milton; so did Hampden; so did
Newton; so did Watt; so did some others that
are thinly dotted over the stage of time. In
these latter days, however, there are more pins,
and the stage has not extended its dimensions.
We are crowded; we hustle each other; and in
the scrimmage the wrong men drop into the
holes, and, in the hurry and bustle of our life,
are trodden into them until they seem to fit. I
firmly believe that there are village Hampdens
and mute inglorious Miltons in scores among us.
All they want is an accident to slip them into
the right holes. I am not sure whether I am
a village Hampden, or a mute inglorious Milton;
but I am satisfied I should have been somebody
very big indeed, if I had not begun my career by
writing that popular work— the " Romance of a
Kidney Pudding." How solidly famous I might
have been by this time had I started with a treatise
on the Cosmogony, or something of that
sort!

I hear a whole chorus of voices openly rebuking
me. Do I not have my reward? Do I not
get more for one of my trashy pieces than was
paid to Goldsmith for his glorious Vicar, or to
Milton for his immortal Paradise Lost? Are
not my trumpery farces announced in the papers
long before their production; are they not criticised
next day in all the journals, as if they
were works of the highest importance? There
is my name blazing amid the record of imperial
affairs. The eye of the reader cannons off
Lord Palmerston on to the Pope, off the Pope
on to Garibaldi, off Garibaldi on to Crasher, and
there it rests in admiration.

Disappointed, rejected, and oppressed aspirants
of high art tendencies, do not, I pray, heap coals
of fire upon my head! Think you that I take pride
in being glorified as a suckler of fools and a
chronicler of small beer? Besides, I would ask
you if this is more than my reward? What do
you imagine are the feelings of a man with a soul
like mine, who, in the course of a work, has to
crush a new hat, cause a fellow-creature to be
knocked into a bandbox, and smash a whole
trayful of cups and saucers? Is there to be
no compensation for injured feelings and outraged
nature? At the same time I am willing
to admit that you, my ten-canto poet— you, my
grave and learned essayist— you, my high art
dramatist, should be glorified in that column,
not I. Go, persuade them to admit your claim
to that consideration which you deserve, and I
will stand aside. I am willing to contend with
you for the high-heeled shoes, when the judge
awards them to him who fills them best.

THE FARM-LABOURER'S INCOME.

A RECENT great international agricultural
show has displayed the British farmer whom
free trade was to have ruined as a thriving
man learning to cultivate his mind as well as
his acres better than of old, and who was developing
with an intellectual energy, of which
in the days of protection he never considered
himself capable, the food resources of the country.
Five-and-twenty years ago an eminent agriculturist
was hissed down by his brother farmers
for suggesting at one of their dinners that the
condition of farm-labourers was not creditable